The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
In one known approach, a packet is received by a network switch, and the packet is then stored in a buffer. When it is determined that the packet is a multicast packet and is to be transmitted via multiple N ports of the network switch, the entire packet is duplicated to provide N−1 additional copies of the packet, and the N−1 additional copies are stored in the buffer. The N multicast packets are then read from the buffer and transmitted via N respective ports.